As your company grows, it can become harder to analyze your data, remain agile for your customers and stakeholders, and build the right infrastructure. Sometimes success requires a new perspective.

Sometimes success comes down to having the right perspective. As your company grows and matures, you are making decisions that can change how you execute on your vision, or even change your goals altogether to align with a changing market, capitalize on new opportunities or address rising challenges. Your ambition hasn’t changed, but the path to delivering on your dreams just might.

In talking with our private company clients, often what we hear is that it’s not the “why” of a company (its reason for being) or the “what” (the products or services they’re creating) that they struggle with. Rather, their central issues focus on the “how” — how do we build our infrastructure in a way that helps our business scale while remaining nimble; how do we keep our customers and stakeholders in the center of all we do as our company grows bigger and more complex; how do we identify the core principles we need to focus on that will be critical to achieving our growth ambitions?

Prioritizing stakeholder relationships

Your investors want to know that the capital they provide will have maximum impact in driving growth and returns. What signs are they looking for? Strong management, well-structured operations, investment in innovations, and strong governance that will provide confidence in a stable foundation for growth.

In fact, investors and other stakeholders have a high regard for board and audit committee oversight, which are typically viewed as keys to good corporate governance and risk management. Of the almost 3,000 executives who responded to the EY 20th Capital Confidence Barometer, 59% indicated that governance was a fundamental or critical driver of long-term value and should be stressed when communicating to stakeholders. It demonstrates reliable financials, sound business management and transparency. While many private companies do not have an advisory board, management can still play an active and visible role in maintaining oversight that enables trust and confidence.

Being able to rely on your financial statements and underlying data not only provides confidence to your stakeholders, but also gives management an opportunity to gain business insights and make informed business decisions. Companies should use their own internal data and relevant external information to identify potential growth opportunities, as well as trends that might make growth more challenging.

Digital innovation transforming business knowledge

When we talk to private company executives, we often find that their growth has accelerated to the point where they need to reconsider how they manage their business. Transforming their processes and policies, supply chain, and internal controls — with strategic investments in emerging technologies to unlock capital and reallocate employee time to more value-added activities — enables companies to establish that they are positioned for growth and the next phase in their business life cycle.

Executives are signaling a strong desire to use technology, automation and AI for back-office processes to free up valuable resources to execute on wider strategic priorities. Similarly, EY is transforming alongside our clients, adopting emerging technologies and data analytics to create a more digital audit. Using automation and artificial intelligence to analyze increasing volumes of data can help to deliver high-quality audits and allows auditors to focus more on risk identification and business insights that help you to gain perspective on your business.

How far can your insights take you?

Encouraged by positive expectations and rising corporate confidence in the world’s biggest deal market, more than half of US executives who responded to the Capital Confidence Barometer expect to pursue M&A in the near term.

Private companies are under no obligation to share their financials, and transparency goes a long way to maintaining trust among investors, customers and employees. With a competitive M&A landscape, having data-driven insights available to assess opportunities, a strong knowledge of your customer base and market to find synergies, and transparent financials to gain access to capital to close deals, could mean the difference between closing on a deal or having it go to another bidder.

Private companies have worked hard to get where they are. Now they need to figure out where to go next — and how. For the most successful private companies, the key to reaching their growth ambitions relies on two things: having a solid foundation to create confidence and trust, and having the right perspective that turns the company’s vision into reality.

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